Article No. 253

Business Practice Findings, by James Larsen, Ph.D.

Fooling Us in the Interview

Research reveals a type of interview question that prompts favor seeking answers.

Have you ever hired the person with the best interview and
then been disappointed in the person's performance on the
job? Have you ever reviewed your interview notes and the
questions you asked and wondered where you went wrong? If
so, you have a lot of company.

Interviewing is something we take very seriously, and it has
been the subject of much research interest.

The most hopeful innovation in recent years has been the
structured interview. The first step in planning a
structured interview is a job analysis to identify the
knowledge, skills, and abilities that characterize successful
employees. Next, questions are carefully written which will
encourage applicants to reveal these qualities if they have
them. A rating system must be created, for example,
behaviorally anchored rating scales, and finally, a numerical
scoring system which assigns overall scores to applicants.

Armed with a list of questions, interviewers read these to
applicants and then listen to their answers. They are
careful not to vary from the question list, and they avoid
giving cues which will steer applicants toward desirable
answers.

Structured interviews are supposed to improve accuracy,
allowing us to do a better job of hiring the best candidates
for our jobs, but research efforts to substantiate this claim
have failed to do so. Aleksander Ellis, from Michigan State
University, is concerned about this problem, and he recently
completed a study that yielded suggestions we can follow to
improve our structured employment interviews.

Ellis noted that two question types dominate structured
interviews. The first he labeled "experience based" and the
second "situation based." Experience based questions ask
applicants to describe an experience that relates to a needed
quality of the job. For example, "Tell about a time when you
resolved a conflict between two people." Situation based
questions ask applicants to describe what they would do in a
hypothetical situation. For example, "If you arrive on the
scene of an accident and find two individuals arguing, what
would you do to calm them down?"

Applicants are often well practiced in recognizing cues that
guide them in answering our questions. They compliment us,
voice our values, take the credit for successes in their
lives, and describe behaviors which are exactly the ones we
are looking for. Indeed, this skill in giving us answers
that make them look good has even been named. It's called
impression management.

A goal of structured interviews is to reduce the influence of
impression management, and it was with this hope in mind that
119 applicants for firefighter in a midwestern city were
interviewed. Ellis analyzed the tapes of these interviews,
and he found that the influence of impression management was
as strong as ever. Applicants using it the most also had the
highest ratings, so the fire department would follow the
mistake of so many other employers: they would hire people
skilled at interviewing rather than fighting fires.
In his analysis, Ellis noticed that the use of favor-seeking
comments were the most influential in swaying the opinions of
interviewers, and the most common favor-seeking comment he
noticed involved voicing beliefs and values that could
reasonably be expected of the interviewer. He also noticed
that situation based questions most often triggered these
favor-seeking comments.

Professor Ellis has two suggestions he feels will help us.
First, we should learn to recognize impression management
comments. We need to distinguish between information about
the person and comments intended only to gain our favor.

Second, we should limit our use of situation based questions.
The opportunity to invent behaviors for hypothetical
situations is too appealing to applicants who desire to
create a favorable image in the minds of their interviewers.
Such questions are invitations to fool us with compliments.
Instead, he recommends we concentrate on experience based
questions.